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Profile Information

Full Name:

Jane Copland

Display Name:

JaneCopland

Job Title:

Independent Contractor

Type of Work:

Independent

Location:

London, England

Favorite Thing About SEO:

Lunch

Bio:

I am an independent consultant working on SEO projects on a freelance basis. Prior to this, I worked as a Search Engine Marketing Consultant and later Head of Business Development with Ayima Search Marketing in London. Before joining Ayima, I was an SEO consultant and blogger at SEOmoz in Seattle for two and a half years.
I am currently a Moz Associate, helping out with Q&A and other tasks on occasion. My Associate page is here: http://moz.com/about/team/janecopland
I am from Wellington, New Zealand.

It was a bit difficult hitting the Compose Entry link in my account to write this, because this will be one of the last blog posts I write as an SEOmoz staff member. At the end of this month and after two and half fantastic years, I'm leaving SEOmoz and Seattle. It's amazingly hard to know how to word something like this: I want to get across so much and there's no way to word it at all cleverly. ...

Last week at Pubcon in Las Vegas, I took part in the session titled, "5 Bloggers and a Microphone." Since then, we've heard a fair bit of feedback that people were disappointed in the session, mainly because the questions we were asked didn't allow us to impart any good blogging knowledge. As was reported in many different places, one attendee asked an in-depth paid search question which...

I always feel the need to reintroduce myself after an extended period away from the blog. I'm Jane and I work here. For the last three weeks, I've done a lot of traveling and attended three vastly different conferences in London and Las Vegas. You may have heard of one of them a little more than you'd have liked to.
I also don...

This is an older topic, but one which is still worth discussing: what is the best way to investigate linkbait, viral or other content-based link building efforts in "boring" industries? How best to find out what worked in the past? How best to find out what didn't work?
We have a range of tools at our disposal when it comes to content-based link building research. You've h...

When Facebook recently revamped its website, widening and dividing its pages into tabs, its staff probably foresaw the initial outcry. Redesign rage is pretty common, and most sites receive some negative feedback when they change things on a large scale. SEOmoz has always heard far more positive comments every time we've redesigned, but we still have to filter the feedback and figure out what work...

Name the number one criticism of linkbait: from a technical point of view, the top problem with popular content is that it often doesn't attract many links. "Linkbait" has become a word we use to mean pretty much anything that gets media attention, no matter whether it is heavily linked to or not. In fact, one could argue that social media sites harm linkbait as much as they help it: if ...

Yesterday afternoon, as I was at home recovering from a form of black death known as the common head cold, I came across Danny Sullivan's piece on Search Engine Land about his dealings with a lazy link broker. I recommend reading Danny's post, which details how he questioned a person who wanted a link on the Sphinn.com homepage with the anchor text "search engine optimisation." The person represented a UK-based SEO firm. I'm not saying that reading or even acknowledging the status of Sphinn is necessary for success in our industry, but one should probably avoid trying to buy links from a site SEOs and search engine employees read with regularity.

Whoa! It's Jane! Yes, SEOmozzers, your regular Roundup Thursday schedule will resume next week when Rebecca gets back from a half-ironman competition in Mexico.
Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week:...

What's the deal with all this advice that Google employees like to give us, then? Of all the search engines (and of many companies of Google's size and scope), Google appears to be the most open with its distribution of information, its interactions with its users and its willingness to give us advice.

As promised last week and earlier today via our Twitter account, we have a new PRO guide to release today. Written by Darren Slatten, The Professional's Guide to PageRank Optimization is a fantastic resource on both the theory and mathematics behind PageRank, and on how SEOs can efficiently practice PageRank sculpting.
...

The Internet, as fragile and infuriating and enigmatic as its features can be, certainly has some great features that I'd really like to see implemented, at least for beta testing, in reality.
Redirecting phone numbers. When I moved to Seattle (two years ago last Saturday), I acquired a local number. In the days before Facebook became microchipped into everyone's forehead, I had lit...

Many of you have probably set your SEOmoz account settings such that when you comment on a blog post, we email you whenever someone adds a new comment. One thing we don't do is include the contents of the new comment in the notification email. Why not? Because then you would have less reason to click through to see the comment in its natural habitat and you'd be less likely to reply. The ...

There is a very large group of vocal, active members on SEOmoz whom we hardly ever see on the blog. Most of them rarely write YOUmoz posts and comment infrequently. However, they spend a lot of time in the same area of the site where I spend the majority of my time: SEO Q&A....

Reputation management problems are delicate enough when a company or an individual discovers negative press in search results for its name or common keywords. The situation becomes even worse when undesirable results are not the work of a disgruntled person writing about another, but of someone pretending to be someone else. With the growth of social media and, specifically, social networking, thi...

Quite often, people ask me this, either to my face, via Q&A or in emails: how do I come up with truly unique, never-before-seen, shiny new ideas? What a question. It's a rare thing to come up with something that's really never been done before. Many of the novels on a bookstore's shelves contain stories that have been told before in one form or another. Real originality is fantastic, but there is plenty to be made from taking a good idea and putting a new spin on it and making it better.

The first time I ever accessed the Internet was from my mother's work computer in late 1995. I was eleven years old and her homepage was set to Yahoo. I can't really remember what it looked like, but Googling (oh, I hate the irony too) "Yahoo in 1995" produced a post by John Battelle with a magnificent screen cap of the portal in the...

This morning, I was talking to Rob Kerry about some particularly competitive search phrases and looking around in the SERPs. We'd gone through most of the usual suspects when [cheap flights] came up. Google duly returned its top ten, and at the bottom, I noticed...

I've recently purchased my first BlackBerry phone, and I've thus been introduced to the joys of a truly mobile Internet. There is a big difference between composing all-lower-case, badly punctuated emails on one of these horrific pieces of rubbish and using a phone that was actually designed with the Internet in mind. However, I've also had the displeasure of visiting sites that aren't designed with mobile phones in mind.

Many of you saw this post from seoco.co.uk this morning (or its Sphinn thread) about our Web 2.0 Awards being removed from Google's index. We noticed the same thing late last night and spent some time this morning going through what could have happened. We ...

There is plenty to read about social media online, but rarely do I come across something that I find really interesting or even particularly believable. On any given day, you can wade through a mass of blog posts and articles about new tools with which to waste time on Twitter. I know how to waste time on Twitter. I do it all the time.

I always find it difficult to begin conference recaps. To me, they always sound trite. They're the high school English class equivalent of the forced short stories that begin, "We packed up the car to go to the beach..." Thus, my complaining about beginning conference recaps is how I've chosen to start this one.
Luckily, there is plenty to talk about from SMX Advanced, and...

Using Twitter over the past week or so has been a very frustrating experience. The site takes a long time to load, its features either intermittently or permanently don't work, updates get lost and, due to the site's miserable uptime, its third party applications don't work either. For a time, every second person's update complained about Twitter's uptime (or lack thereof), and some suggested a mu...

To quote our fantastic CTO Jeff Pollard, we're live. Two years after SEOmoz's first Web 2.0 Awards launched, we've finally finished compiling, ranking and awarding hundreds of websites across forty-one categories. We've added new categories and removed outdated ones. We've also again teamed with a great group of bloggers, marketers, and w...

We work in an industry where no one lacks the ability to link. It's very tough to find one SEO, or one person who's interested in SEO, who doesn't have a website of some sort. Many of us have more than one: a work-related domain and a personal or hobby site. None of us lack the ability to link.
Thus, it seems we sometimes forget that not all industries are like ours.
...

I know, it's hard to believe. I'm doing the Thursday round up. Rebecca has left town for Memorial Day weekend and thus it's fallen to me to get together this week's links. When she says it's more time consuming than it seems, she isn't lying....

If you take any interest in Sphinn and the debates which rage therein, you properly noticed last week's uproar over linkbait specialist Lyndon Antcliff's fake story that ended up being mentioned on Fox News. We've dabbled in a fair few linkbait projects over the years and since the Sphinn discussion was still alive just two days ago, I don't think it's t...

I don't often get indignant about websites. Even bad ones. Sometimes I complain about what passes for Web 2.0 genius, but never before have I been really horrified by an online service. Spock.com horrifies me. I have never before felt like a website should cease to exist, but I am appalled at my experience with Spock. I'm in the process of having my personal information removed from the site at th...

I apologise for another Facebook-centred post, but something interesting happened to me this week. I also realise that it is a bit strange to title an original post, "The Revised Edition," but this is indeed a complete re-write of my first draft. My initial post was titled, "Cusomter Service Protocol 101: Threaten To Ban Your Most Loyal Users" and it was quite the diatribe. You see, on Monday Facebook threatened to ban me. They said I had been caught spamming. I became very angry, as I hadn't spammed anyone. I'm also one of Facebook's biggest fans in an environment where everyone has something bad to say about the company.

If I had been paying attention on April 15th, instead of swanning around New Zealand, I would have noticed that Facebook had launched what amounts to an elementary keyword research tool... and as I write that, I realise that Facebook Lexicon is perhaps less elementary than some of the tools that we already pay for. An anonymous aggregation of "public and semi-public" keywords from across...

I may be totally wrong on this, or maybe I've overlooked some obvious explanation as to why the content on the end of nofollowed SEOmoz comment links has been indexed and ranked. Puzzling over this by myself and with friends hasn't produced any good conclusions, so I thought I'd throw this out there to the community.
Nutshell: periodically, I'll search for my own name in search engi...

This past Tuesday night (and, eventually, Wednesday morning), Rand and I sat down and "wrote" a post that we were quite sure was rather amusing. Admittedly, posting to a widely read SEO blog after getting little sleep and consuming three beers and two cocktails isn't advisable. We were, however, relatively sure we were on to something good.

Hello, SEOmoz readers. My name is Jane and I work here. You may remember me from posts that were written about two weeks ago. I've been pretty quiet recently (the Moz Points are suffering) because I've been at the first SMX show in Australia. Rand already wrote about the show, but I thought I'd share my take on the conference and provide a short "overheard" as well.
At the...

At any given time, our Q&A section usually features a question or two about image optimisation. People want to know why their images haven't been indexed or aren't appearing for their key terms, even after they have added keywords to every imaginable attribute. Appropriate anchor text, nearby-keywords and relevant surrounding content doesn't seem to have made a difference. The images don't sho...

I don't watch much television. It's silly really. I bought a big flat screen HDTV DVR OMG WTF television before I could really afford such things and I only regularly watch two shows. Tonight, one of my two shows will go off air for the last time, leaving me with only American Idol, which I encourage you all to link to from now on as American Idle (and al...

Like most SEOs I know, I have a couple of sites that act as my side projects. They aren't monetised and I plan to keep them that way: I like to keep an eye on it for the purpose of experiments. By this I mean that I like to mess around with them and if one of them drops completely from every search engine, loses all of its PageRank and its server catches fire, it doesn't matter all that much....

Caught during a moment of extreme moral ineptitude on Saturday, I did the unthinkable. I signed up to Twitter. I felt like a fourteen seventeen year old who's been thinking about sneaking into the parents' booze cabinet with her friends and finally makes the decision to pick the lock. I felt bad immediately, especially given ...

I remember the first time I heard about someone ending a relationship via email. It was a long time ago (like, in the nineties) and possibly in the days before I had an email account of my own. Everyone was shocked at how someone could bring themselves to do something like that online. Now, such a break-up would constitute a gross lack of inventiveness.
Why not edit your ...

I'm actually serious with the title here. This session was great. Honestly, I've been to more informative sessions here at SMX West than I've been to since Pubcon 2006, where I knew nothing about SEO and everything I heard was new. Unraveling URLs & Demystifying Domains had some good speakers who each provided...

If there's one thing that doesn't seem to receive terribly much attention, it's image and video search. There has usually been a session at every conference, but images were often ignored in favour of both paid and regular organic search. Along came blended results and everybody takes more notice.

"Avoid tricks," Google says, "intended to improve search engine rankings." Of course, they don't mean it, or else we'd all be out of a job. When we explain what we do to people, we tend to use words like "tactics", "methods" and "strategies." The Search Engine Strategies Conference and Expo is currently taking place in London. Search Engin...

Disclaimer: I work for a company called SEOmoz. Its
There is absolutely nothing wrong with making up new words for something that, as it stands, can't be properly named or described with existing language. Quite simply, this is how languages evolve and grow, and it would be tough to name everything with words that already exist....

I can credit the ideas for the post to a couple of other blog entries I've read around the web today, beginning here at SEOmoz with justFred's YOUmoz entry about our thumbs system and whether the relative popularity of a comment or post within this website makes a difference...

I'm about to bring up something I've written about before (one month ago today, actually), but today I've taken part in an interesting task that further highlights the disconnect between advertising and search engine marketing. I saw a funny ad on the bus today while I was on my way to work. I really wanted to take out ...

If you've ever had a small to medium sized website have an incredibly popular outing at Digg, the following story is probably quite familiar. Many months later - seven, in this case - the referrals from Digg, whilst having dwindled to very few, keep rolling in on a somewhat regular basis. You didn't think much of it, because you'd become accustomed to seeing that page or those pages get Digg, Stum...

While this is not meant to count as our weekly social media post (Wasabi Wednesday, if you will), I'm pleased to set free our newest directory. Added to our Premium Content, the Social Directory is lists social media sites that can help you accomplish one of three things: allow direct outbound links, provide profiles that rank well in search engines, or serve as great places to promote link-worthy...

Every time I research something using classified sites, I'm surprised at two things: Firstly, very few people understand the first rule about writing online advertisements, which has to be getting people to click on the ad. Secondly, it surprises me that even thought I know some of the ads might contain great content, I rarely click on ads that are badly worded. Surely I've been doing this long en...

Initially, I was going to wade through all of the nominations for this year's SEOmoz Web 2.0 Awards before writing a blog post about them. Currently, I've only made it through two thirds of the entrants and I can't take any more, at least for a little while. Over a year ago, people were predicting the imminent death of "web 2.0" companies and yet the companies soldiered on.

It's the second of January and those of us in the United States are already pretty tired of hearing about November's Presidential Election. I'm sure the rest of you are, too. The world of social media is already flooded with stories about the U.S.'s political dramas and I can only imagine that if you're in any other country, today's offerings at Reddit might not interest you all that much. Current...

I want to get a new telephone. There is really nothing wrong with the one I have right now: it's been dropped a couple of (ten) times and I once dropped it into Lake Union. It dried. It calls other phones, receives calls and text messages, and it fits nicely in pockets and purses. But it doesn't do Internet, and that's not acceptable. Too often, I'm away from my computer and I want to look somethi...

I know exactly what you should do with your blog because it isn't mine, I don't have to implement any of the changes and if my advice is crap, I don't have to live with the consequences. This said, I've been poking around inside my favourite social networking site and I've...

Those of you long-time readers who were here about a month ago may remember Rebecca's highly popular post, Please Stop Spamming Me for Votes. In the post, Rebecca recounts a tale of an SEO asking her to vote on a story at a social media site. When she refused, the SEO replied with, "Tuesdays and Thursdays are social da...

I don't know what it is about this town, but things work very differently here. I've been getting little sleep and not eating very much (aside from a trip to the Bellagio's buffet where I ate myself sick) and yet I feel fantastic. They say casinos pump oxygen into the gambling halls and bars in order to keep you awake and alert and spending money. Whatever it is, it works.
This morn...

Please excuse the post's title. It's been a long day already and I'm terrible at writing titles at the best of times. From the nineteenth floor of the Wynn in Las Vegas, my fried brain decided that an off-topic title for an on-topic piece was just fine.
Most of you know why we're here. It's Pubcon. This conference marks the first time I've been "back" to an industry event,...

I'm going to blatantly copy my fellow Linkbait and Viral Marketing presenter Ciarán and post my slides and notes here for you guys. What can I say. Imitation is flattering, isn't it? And the posts are a good idea: it means that you all get to hear what I said about all the slides and you don't have any irritating PowerPoint presentation to download. Because I know you all secretly ...

In a couple of hours, I'll leave for Heathrow after attending the inaugural SMX London and speaking on my first session, Linkbait and Viral Marketing. And only twelve hours after I'd finally aclcimatised to the eight-hour time difference between Western Europe and the U.S.'s West Coast. That's a tough one to get used to. I did everything in my power to stay awake upon arriving in London, including...

On Thursday and Friday of this week, Gillian and I will be attending SMX London - the SMX conference series' second European station. As opposed to the three conferences I've attended in the past (Pubcon 2006, SES New York 2007 and SMX Seattle this past June), I'm going to be taking part in a panel in London. I've mentioned this once before, but as I'm leaving tomorrow, things are about t...

Seattle-based wiki website Wetpaint have always done things a little differently to most wiki providers. With a highly user-friendly interface, Wetpaint lets even the most technically-uninclined people create websites. The sites, which are of course all wikis, can either be hosted at Wetpaint or on a ...

One of the daily tasks that either myself or Rebecca take care of is moderating YOUmoz submissions. Everyone who has ever submitted a YOUmoz entry will know the process: you compose your piece, hit submit, and wait around for an SEOmoz staff member to publish it. If a piece is original (that is, it doesn't show up in Google when we search for a snippet of its text), is coherent, on-topic and gener...

Rand, how on earth do you expect me to complete any solid keyword research when you assign me a task that involves Facebook? Luckily, you asked me to review the most successful (and most useful, as they're not necessarily the same thing) Facebook applications. I'm one of those people who have shied away from adding applications to my Facebook account because I remember when Facebook was like a ren...

Yesterday, I received an email from Christ Bennett at 97th Floor, telling me about an awesome tool they were due to release tomorrow (now today, obviously), that lets you tell how many times a page you're currently viewing has been submitted to / voted upon at the four biggest social media services. However, far from being just a Firefox toolbar extension, the tool also shows up on Digg, Reddit, S...

While most of the search world is partying with Rebecca attending sessions at SES San Jose, some of us have been working away at our computers as though the biggest search function wasn't going on two states away. It's actually kind of awesome to be in such a quiet office, and it's equally pleasant not to have to pander to Rebecca's dislike of certain food groups when we ...

As a midyear Christmas present, I'd like to ask Google for a few things that would make my life a bit easier. Just to clarify, Google, I love you very much and I think you're superb, but everyone can do better. These are my requests:

The Times Online is reporting today that "charities involved with eating disorders" are asking sites like YouTube and MySpace to ban or remove groups and videos that glorify and promote afflictions such as anorexia. While neither service is showing much interest in censoring their weight-ob...

With only a couple of exceptions, barely anyone has ever complained about receiving a lot of attention from social media. Occasionally, large social media communities, especially the one that rhymes with "pig", will take it upon themselves to pick on a website or an individual; however, aside from harassment, it's usually a good thing to have your content get popular in the social media ...

I've been sitting next to Lisa from Bruce Clay for too long, as I've now finally given in to the temptation to blog live from a session at a conference. I've never wanted to do this before, as I like to spend a long time composing my articles and blog entries (whether it shows or not...) and there's not much time for reflection when you're in the front row of the Personalized Search session....

Today, we're launching our second annual Web 2.0 Awards. Only a month after we'd intended on launching (SES New York and that pesky "real work" stuff kept getting in the way), we've finally collected, collated and presented just under 300 sites in forty-one categories. Some of the winners and "honorable mentions" are similar to last year; others are completely different.

Cameron Olthuis over at Link Building Blog has been pondering the importance of positive comments on social media stories. His take is that even good content can be irreparably wounded by a few negative comments appearing first on its comment thread. The classic social media trait of voting for (or voting down) a story befo...

While Rebecca and I were in New York this past week, we sat down with Michael McDonald of WebProNews to discuss some social media issues. While Rebecca is upset that she has a large strand of hair partially covering her face, and I'm amused at the awful look on my face in the embedded player, we didn't come across too badly on the film so we decided to post it here.

It's just so much fun to get up at 4:30am in order to get to the airport, and it's even better when an oversized limousine backs into your brand new Jeep outside Departures. What a wonderful start to my first SES conference! Luckily, no one was in our car when the dip-stick driver threw his massive car into reverse and busted up our bumper, so our insurance won't suffer.
...

We post about Digg quite often (and here we go again), but I've been watching certain Digg phenomenon for a while, and one stands out from the rest as the most ironic and most amusing. My favourite Digg irony is the hatred the (a-HEM) Diggorati have for SEO, coupled with the fact that they fall for our linkbait All. The. Time.
Every so often, one of our employees will roll into the ...

Rand send me an email on Monday and asked me to review Twitter for the blog as it's been getting some coverage is the blogosphere lately. I'd heard of the site, but had never really investigated it in depth, so I signed up...

Online reputation management is something that (unless we are very stupid) we've all done. We've all crafted something on our blogs or social networking profiles to project a specific image to the public. Unless a blog or profile is private, we have no idea who that "public" might include.

Last week, Rand discovered that an article we'd written quite some time ago had never been launched. "How to Leverage Web 2.0 & Social Media Sites to Market Your Brand & Control Your Message" covers thirty sites that you can use for marketing.

... and here I am in Seattle. No great arches. No grand museums, galleries or cathedrals. Only one iconic tower. While Scott and Rebecca have been drinking with SEOs in London and Chunneling it to Paris, Jeff, Matt and I have been sitting in our office, glaring glumly at a Western Washington sky that was blue this morning and is now pissing down with rain.

Our readers have done a great job of nominating websites for our 2007 Web 2.0 Awards, but I wanted to remind you all that today is the last day that we'll accept submissions for the awards. Because being strict with deadlines is fun when you're the one implementing the deadline, we won't accept any submissions that arrive after midnight tonight, Pacific time. So this is the last call to arms: get ...

Oh, perspective. It's a fantastic human characteristic that, among other things, lets us compare how we once felt with how we feel now. When I began working at SEOmoz, I was aware that, in comparison to many people, I knew "a lot" about the series of tubes some call the internet, but far less than I'd soon know. Here are some of the lighter-hearted things I've learned since September 18,...

I would start this post with the customary "I'm sorry for using the phrase Web 2.0" apology, but everyone who's ever used the term has already groveled to the 2.0 haters. It's that time of year again, folks. I have been charged with organizing the second annual Web 2.0 Awards.Last year, the Awards began as little more than a pet pro...

As a new SEO, I've found that one particular part of my job provides both a lot of satisfaction and a great deal of frustration. No, it's not attempting to talk to the big-shots at conferences (I'm female; advantage Copland), it's using analytics. I spent a whole afternoon enthralled with a list of a client's referrers once, but I've also spent a great deal of time trying to wade through the less ...

It's done! After spending the short Thanksgiving week going over my collection of notes from WebmasterWorld's Conference and PubCon, I've finally completed my first SEOmoz article. To avoid reading the rest of this post and go straight to the goods, you can find the literary gem here!From the smoke-filled Las Vegas airp...

When I flew back from the NCAA championships this past spring, I thought to myself "well, that's the last time I'll fly on an aeroplane for a good long time." I was facing imminent graduation (read: unemployment) and I expected to be expelled into the world, a lowly M.A-less English major, browsing job websites for Junior Copywriter positions until the next coming of Christ. The gig w...

While browsing through my favourite websites this morning, I happened across a very good (or, very bad) example of a careless editing turning into an embarrassment for a credible organization. Swimming World Magazine is usually very good at posting interesting stories about the aquatic world; however, t...

If you've ever signed up for an account on a Web 2.0 site, you've seen it: The ugly little image that appears after you've plugged in your desired user name, password, and email address. They're usually either ridiculously colourful, lying on a gridded background, or both. Annoying as they may be, these CAPTCHAs are included in the account creation process for the sole purpose of ...

Back in the olden days when I was a Mozzer, we walked there every morning from the office on Roosevelt :) The coffee was fantastic. Besides a pint of Mac and Jack's, it was the first thing I got my hands on when I came to Seattle for Mozcon last year.

What I find particularly frustrating is trying to use maths to predict the breakdown of (not provided) traffic (brand, non-brand, etc.) when the percentage gets so incredibly high. When 40%+ of search traffic has its keywords hidden, I don't feel great making guesses about its composition based upon the 60% left over, even if those guesses are based on data analysis where I have data.

45% is the worst I've seen lately, and that was spread over the course of many months. Other sites I have a lot to do with are in the 20% range, and it grows - slowly - week on week.

I appreciate where you're coming from, but I feel that many of us would just rather our looks not be brought up in areas like this, where they don't matter. This sort of thing happens relatively often to many of us, and isn't always positive. I know you probably don't see it that often, but being told about whether you're attractive or not is fairly commonplace and can get tiresome. I don't want my looks to matter here, and I would bet Lindsay would rather her posts be read without that being considered as well.

I can't speak for everyone, but for me personally, I'd just rather not be reminded or informed about whether someone finds me attractive or not in an environment like an SEO blog.

The majority of women you find in this field, or those who'd cut it in this field, are not the sort of weak little girls who'd let a controversial blog post make them stay away from or leave the industry.

That alone is a sexist mindset: that women need to see nice comments because they can't take all this negativity. Um, what? I'm one of the more thin-skinned people you'll meet in SEO, and this still absolutely blows my mind.

Sorry to hijack the comments, but it's really poor taste to suggest that because Lindsay's female, she needs some nice comments to make herself feel better.

As someone who's heard similar, no, this isn't a compliment in the slightest. I know you meant it nicely, but Joe is right - it's degrading to be judged positively or negatively based on your looks, whether those looks are perceived as good or bad, when the original piece of work had nothing to do with gender or appearance.

What if we're talking about different things? I like what Russ has just said about spam (surely the spam we get upset about should be harmful to quality at the least, rather than being a legitimate website's non-Google-friendly activities?) - but as Rob said, different people will have different definitions of what spam is. If breaking the Google guidelines in any way is spam, I do not believe that anyone in this thread is innocent. We'd need to haggle long and hard about what actually constitutes spam before we could agree on what we should blog about, shouldn't we?

The idea of someone's old links being jumped upon by the likes of the New York Times isn't an appealing one. That isn't a totally unlikely situation: a person writing about spam for a major newspaper is unlikely to know SEO as well as we do, and won't necessarily know that the links they're outing are old. They likely won't know that you can find out when a link was added. They likely won't know that spam pops up by a range of methods: competitive sabotage, automated track-hiding, content scraping, unintentional duplicate content, etc. They likely won't be able to tell the difference between spammy noise, regular noise, natural high-quality linking and planned SEO strategy. Preferably, no one can tell the difference between the last two or three, but an untrained eye isn't likely to get it right.

As Rob said, it's very rarely that I've gone through a site's backlinks and not found what many would classify as spam. Aged sites often have a selection of very poor backlinks. We've cleaned up backlink profiles to the best of our abilities and still not managed to get rid of everything we don't like. We've also seen first-hand that people can and do buy massive numbers of poisonous links in an attempt to burn competing websites. This isn't just theorising: we've seen it happen, and had to clean that up too.

I would hate to be the SEO sitting on an account when this happens, trying to explain that "it wasn't us" when the LA Times or whoever sees fit "outs" a site's maliciously-acquired links. Some very undeserved suffering.

The argument isn't as simple as "we need to shine a light on each other", because half the time, we don't know what each other is responsible for. Again: you may out someone for bad off-page work and actually be outing negative SEO, done to them by a competitor.

If Google gets it right, those links just get discounted.

But if those links are outed in such an embarrassing way that makes Google looks stupid, you can be made an example of. I'm not willing to take that risk and out people, even if I'm sure I'm right, because I don't have access to the company or the agency's bank accounts, emails or Basecamps and I don't know what they've actually been doing.

I agree that true spam makes the web a worse place. I hate searching for something and having empty, useless pages rank. I am not sure what it's best to do about stuff like that. I've never had much of a problem with Rand or anyone else saying, "What the hell, Google - I searched for [how to make blue widgets] and was presented with a bunch of rubbish! Page after page of Adsense (lol irony), keyword stuffing and no real information whatsoever. It's all meaningless spam!"

But many of us aren't coming at this from the perspective of crap content farms or MFA sites: we're thinking about our clients who, if outing is regular practice, could well end up burning for what someone else has done to them, what an SEO company who has been fired has done to them in the past, for creatively interpreted data, or for whatever other reason than they knowingly spammed.

My initial comment on Twitter, included in the screenshot above, was neither a defence of nor a protest again outing. I used to work at SEOmoz and heard a lot of criticism aimed at Rand for writing about the topic in the past, so I was irritated not to see the same outcry when a popular developer openly admitted he was outing GoDaddy's tactic because them beating him in the SERPs had pissed him off. I don't buy the argument that it doesn't matter because Google probably won't do anything about GoDaddy: either we're okay folks with publicly highlighting SEO tactics that we don't like, or we aren't.

I am a big fan of yours, Rand. I understand the sort of spam that pops up and pisses you off, making you wonder why the hell they can't do something about it. It's annoyed me too. But outing can and will get abused or done mistakenly, and I'm not personally willing to potentially cause massive damage to another business because I have an inkling that they broke Google's guidelines.

I disagree (not with wanting to play Pacman): If this is true, and the argument backing up the thesis is certainly excellent, then we need to modify our understanding of how Google works, whether we're gaming the system or not. If we don't change our established views about how Google works, we'll think of Google in 2004 / 2009 / 2012 terms for far too long.

After all, we'd be horribly ineffectual SEOs if we did our job to satisfy Google circa 2002.

This is why I don't get why people get so upset when someone writes or says something about "black hat" SEO. You can learn a lot from just understanding something, whether you choose to use it or not.

That is the one thing that turns me off so badly about reputation management. I worked on a case once (one that Rand hasn't mentioned here!) where results were not only difficult to move due to being on very prestigious websites, but new results would pop up too. It didn't appear that anything had changed in terms of the things that had earned them the bad reputation.

I think it goes beyond the irritating language and pseudo-cool folks a lot of people seem to associate with "social media marketer." They're the stereotype, but they're not really the reality in my experience (although I do know one such person, to be fair). I thought Shankman was protesting against a more ingrained, better-disguised version of social media bullshit: the guy who's not dressed like he's 15 but who writes the same blog post over and over again with a different title, saying nothing more revolutionary than he did last week. The girl who tweets about how to get more Twitter followers, and that's her job. And they're heralded for it like it's actually important and helpful and hasn't been said over and over again by swarms of social media marketer clones.

The emperor has no clothes. I could have written a similar rant because I've sat around in this industry for five years, looking at naked emperors! Shankman's trolling in that he appreciates good marketing and uses provocative language anyway. Hey, that's also good marketing, as we've established! :D

Shankman can be the beneficiary of thousands of his own Twitter followers, thunderous traffic from Reddit (800+ points and rising as of this afternoon) and can still dislike people who talk rubbish, pretend that their Facebook fan pages are the height of fine art and, when they meet you at an industry event, weigh you up to see if you're worth talking to. Your worth is often, for these people, counted in Twitter followers.

I read this as being a rant against those people, and fair enough too. Shankman knows what he's doing and he appreciates good marketing along with the rest of us. To my mind, his opinion of the bottom feeders of the industry is actually a plug for people who are talented, hard-working, and who don't consider regurgitating "RT @blanddigitialbore Facebook / Twitter Integration with Adwords YouTube Comment Aggregation post #seo #socialmedia #greatpostdude #bestthingever http://bit.ly/iux7Sb" to be the most profound display of marketing ever put to print. May 24, 2011

I'm sorry you didn't find Q&A helpful. It's something I've worked fairly hard on in varying capacities for a few years now. I managed it as an employee two years ago and have helped out when I can now that I work overseas. I'm now indeed one of quite a few people who operate in there.

I hope you gave it more than one chance, or will try it again in the future.

I was heavily involved in the conference scene (attended a couple this past year too, but on a far more toned-down level). Indeed, it did me many favours, many of which I didn't deserve until later in my career.

Yours isn't the popular view on this thread, but after watching the popular conference circuit crew in the United States (I live in England now, but was a Seattleite until January 2009) turn sour, turn on each other and generally turn nasty, I relate more to yours and wtfseo's points of view.

I work in some of the niches you've worked in, and some others too. Is a different world to the one where writing a blog post about Twitter makes a splash. We can't, even if we wanted to, write publicly about the things we're into now. Our competitive advantage would evaporate and our clients would probably have serious legal recourse against us. We can make generlisations and nameless examples, and sometimes we're lucky enough to have a public client, but they're rarely the really impressive ones.

It's wonderful! I love these sites and markets. I used to be a competitive swimmer, and dealing with finance or gambling is like walking into the Sydney Aquatic Centre for a competition. Nowhere to hide: time to deliver.

People who quietly practice SEO on a daily basis in offices across the world far outnumber the small percentage who "come across like uber bitches in (their) public personas". Why is that necessary? It's not impressive. It creates a negative environment in which no one's professional life gets any better, and it results in most of us just looking really childish and silly.

Since it's an echo chamber, the loud ones only ever hear the praise from their loud peers. I am glad not everyone is as impressed with the noise.

I suppose one clarification I should make about my observation was that it's never been the YouTube-esque random stranger's comments and nastiness that tired me out: it was people I, and many of us, know. I'm not particularly thick skinned, especially when the comments get personal!

Lovely irony that people in this communication-centric industry fail miserably at communicating in a dignified manner. I've been guilty of that too (some of the things I thought and said and giggled about three years ago are embarrassing), but have changed that too. It's called growing up.

It's no secret that I've begun to rather dislike the social networking aspects of SEO, hence the deleted Twitter account and removal of any non-real-life-friends from Facebook. And a big drop in how much I write in public. A friend argued to me recently that it's done me no favours: Whereas I used to appear on these amazingly boring lists of who's who, I don't anymore. Ironically, I'm many times more competent at what I do than I was eighteen months ago, when my name would make it onto several of them. Hilarious! The only reason anyone took notice of me was because I was a loudmouth!

I rest assured that the people who need to know what I'm capable of, do, as does my resume. Life's also a lot more peaceful.

Most of the time, people get attention for what they say, not what they do. Show up at any affiliate conference and see how many people you don't know. They're the successful ones: the ones who've been at home in their underpants, making miwwions, while the SEO kids wrote blog posts about each other.

I completely agree about the bias we hold towards others. I don't want to believe that people I distrust are capable of excellence, or even capable of not being awful people, even though I know they are. And they often prove it. Every once in a while, shut up and listen. Check.

Re making new friends at conferences--I find the following enjoyable:

The first time I allowed myself to venture outside the supposedly acceptable group at a conference (Pubcon 07), I met the people who would become my coworkers by 2010, as well as close SEOmoz friends and colleagues. The professional benefits were profound. Additionally, some of them became best friends as well. And all the while, I was accused of "not networking properly", when I was making connections with "strangers" that greatly benefitted both me and my then-employer. Multiple times, especially over the past year, I've looked at an impressive professional situation regarding either SEOmoz or Ayima (where I work now) and I've thought "all this because I spent hours in the Parasol Up bar at the Wynn one week in December 2007 with people I didn't know."

Re bad blood from non-communication: my experience is that the only good way to communicate a potentially heated misunderstanding or disagreement is in private. See link below.

Seems that comments and tweets (especially tweets) are just fuel for a snarky public fire we've created. We're so rude to each other! I backed away from the public side of the SEO industry because I was tired of people being rude. Explained better here.

Oh wow, Danny, best of luck! I know that leaving a company like SEOmoz isn't an easy decision, but I too had metrics like yours (albeit a different list). Sometimes following your heart and your dreams means making tough choices, but believe me, they're worth it! You posted this two years and one day after I wrote my "leaving" piece (haha, note to Mozzers, New Year is dangerous :p) and I wish you all the excitement, adventure, discovery and love I've had in the past twenty-four months. If you're stopping by Londontown in your journeys, let me know and we'll get a warmish pint and some chips down at my local :)

Wow, three comments of mine made it to the top? That's crazy - they must be some of the only comments I've made this year ;) I guess I held true to my resolution to only say something when it really needed to be said?!

Thanks for this, Jen. I had no idea those comments had attracted so many upthumbs! Still haven't topped my most thumbed comment though - 39 up, 2 down - from 2009. Not sure you'd have wanted to highlight that one in a post, though, so good thing this is 2010 only ;)

Even though you are blatantly insane (what did you think would happen, man!), I really like that you did this with an established site that you knew inside and out. I expect there is a flaw in the texting / experiment process when people create throw-away domains in order to try things out (I have done this, but after a while I took to doing experiments on a couple of my dad's sites. Don't tell him please). For this, the site had real rankings, real content, and you were aware of how it had performed in search engines in the past. The results here are probably far more realistic in terms of what would happen to someone's business if they made the same mistake.

I can see this becoming more of a problem as the tag gets older and people lazily add it via content management systems, just like back in the day when they noindexed their sites, blocked bots via robots.txt and were allowed unsupervised access to Webmaster Tools' geolocation feature :)

EDIT: Someone else may have asked, but did you look at Bing traffic / rankings / indexation too?

As a former blog contributor and sometime YOUmoz editor, I can echo Pete's statements here - we discussed criteria for publication endlessly, and whilst I probably wouldn't have published this one in its original state for all the reasons cited, it can become tough to make a call. I never envied Rebecca's job as YOUmoz editor, and I don't envy Jen. Q&A is definitely more my area!

As far as spam goes, like Pete said, it's being worked on. The only message I have to add here is that the devs have put several things in place recently that helps us on the spam front: we can now delete all spam comments from an account immediately, and we always do this plus ban the account as soon as we see it going on. The same goes for when we're alerted to spam Private Messages, although we can't delete all of those immediately. There's a fairly large team of Moz associates in the UK (Distilled London crew and me), so there are few times during the day when someone isn't around to cull the spammers - I for one get up at 5am GMT and the Seattleites go to bed shortly thereafter ;)

You have SMX Sydney, but that takes place earlier in the year. I went in 2008 and 2009 and it was great, but the trip down from London is really painful for a week-long event.

Getting over to California or Seattle is an all right journey: there's a straight flight to LA and San Francisco, but I remember the SF flight being 14 hours long. Ouch. However, there are tons of conferences on the West Coast that would require a far less painful journey than trekking to New York or Europe.

The guys who put on SMX Sydney also do Search Engine Bootcamps in Australia and New Zealand. Cheeky trip to Wellington? I'd be ever so envious :p (home town).

I've always used my real name and photo here, but back in the day when I used to engage in that horrible habit that is Twitter, on the occasion when people would mention my Twitter user-name offline, I found it strange. It was only my last name and initials, so not even that removed from my real name.

I agree about handles suddenly sounding pretenious (although you earned yours, which makes it a bit different!)

I am going to a conference in the UK next month that used Twitter handles for people's name tags. I have no idea what they'll put on mine. There might end up being a hole in the universe.

Couldn't agree more about the user name / avatar thing. I think it was as far back as 2007 when I made an insightful comment along the lines of: if your user name is BobSEOstar092 and your avatar is a squirrel riding a German shepherd, it's not helpful to introduce yourself as "Rob from the blog" and expect everyone to immediately know who you are when you meet them in person. I've had several awkward encounters with people whom I'd have recognised straight away if I'd known their online names!

Hell, meeting people for the first time in person at conferences is sometimes a struggle anyway. I think this is actually even more true when you do know the person relatively well on the Internet. It's not like meeting a stranger. Do you talk to them the same way as you usually do on the Internet? Yes, I really am that awkward.

The first time I met Ciaran (now a great friend) after speaking to him online for a year, it was like we were eleven:

There'll be a Distilled / Moz conference in London later this year :D Last year's was brilliant - I can't wait to take part again. A fair few US-based SEOmoz and Distilled people usually head over as well. Believe they'll put up dates, etc here soon!

Thanks for this, Richard. I've read quality stuff from you regarding microformats before, so it's great to see it on the Moz blog! It's definitely something I'm interested in learning more about.

Part of using this sort of markup effectively is also going to depend on having the imagination to recognise when it can be used for the betterment of your current rankings. I have a few projects at the moment that will benefit from its use, so here's to another reminder to get on it ;)

"Acquire" has been standard industry slang for "buy" when it comes to links for years. Why? Because one usually buys the commercial goods one acquires. Your experiment is boringly semantic, and is like me saying that I've acquired an iPad, then feeling smug because people think I must have been rich enough to buy one, when in fact I won it in a competition. Which is a true story.

That is, your experiment is flawed because you assume everyone questions accepted slang. To give you another example, you wouldn't ask me if I wanted to go out for a drink and then stop me after I'd had one, because you'd only asked me if I wanted *a* drink, not two. "Do you want to go out for a drink?" implies more than one drink in our society.

All this said, to me, this sounds like so much back-peddling. June 29, 2010

When I first read "If we meet up for a drink", I thought your analogy was going to be "... and you ordered something completely different from the last thirty times we'd drunk together", and you'd make some comparison between drinking habits and the patterns seen in spammy backlink profiles.

I think a spam drink would be a Jaeger bomb. A whitehat drink would be Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc.

I saw the post; I asked if you had any examples as it sounded as though you had experience of seeing this work and work for more than a short period. That was just my assumption, so I apologise if I read that incorrectly. I've personally seen it attempted, but thwarted, when the owners caught wind of the activity. Can't say exactly what would have happened if they'd not noticed it. June 29, 2010

To my mind, the patterns point is one of the most important in this post. Someone would have a tough time bringing down a site whose entire backlink profile looks clean. We already know that Google is brilliant at analysing backlink profiles for optimisation it finds undesirable; a big red flag on an otherwise pristine domain would, to me, warrant a look from a member of webspam, who'd in turn take no time at all to identify the bad links' source and note that the activity is entirely uncharacteristic.

Individual circumstances would vary and sometimes a person or a computer will get it wrong, but it seems to me that patterns and footprints are sites' biggest safe-guard.

Where I see this working best is in SERPs that are already hyper-competitive and often err on the side of grey to begin with. It won't work on SEOmoz.org, but if you're a well-ranked gambling affiliate? I'd be a bit more concerned if I saw horrible link networks swarming to my site. June 29, 2010

Do you have some examples where you've seen this happen and succeed long-term? One thing I'd expect is that even if Google gets it wrong and penalises a site, a reconsideration request and spam report from the site's owner should take care of it (unless the webmaster has taken part in other unrelated spammy tactics, at which point reporting an attack won't help). June 29, 2010

It's a good discussion and one that's far more on-topic than some comment threads end up being!

The location of many conference is obviously a pain for lots of people: If I lived in my native New Zealand, I'd not have had the choice of going to either SMX London or Munich - those destinations took the better part of two days to get to! Events take place in New Zealand and Australia (Barry Smyth's team at Search Engine Bootcamp makes sure of this), but not to the extent that we get to enjoy in Europe or North America.

I've got to think someone has offered a paid option for streaming conferences before, but I've not heard of it in our industry. That's a bit sad since we're meant to be such high-tech individuals :)

This balance has always been tough on the Web, right? Aaron Wall often points out that at some point, a person needs to pay for good content, but we're trying to find where that point is, I suppose. May 24, 2010

I agree that presenting a full rendition of a conference presentation might be taking it a bit too far... I've posted full recaps of things I've done at seminars before, and although some shows make presenters' posts available after the fact, I guess there has to be a threshold of how much should be kept for paying attendees. a4u Munich posted presentations online (that conference was on at the same time as SMX and was of a really high quality). However, as the comments here show, it takes the input of the speaker for many of the slides to make sense.

Edit: Case in point: there is one comment on my presentation on Slideshare. It makes the observation that the presentation is "short". Due to discussion, the 15 or so slides took an hour to get through. The visual prop alone doesn't do a session justice.

I also asked for Q&A to take place througout, so lots of people put their hands up... that's obviously in no way represented by the online slide show. I tend to think that can be a more informative format than an hour of someone rattling on anyway.

Sad to hear that SMX was heavy on the self-promotional side. Like I said, I wasn't there this year, but I would have hoped people were aware that an hour-long sales pitch and in-joking doesn't impress an online marketing audience :\

Ooh, yeah, there's another one. And one that few people can replicate :) I live 4min, 40sec walk from work (yes I timed it). Take that, TFL! Rob Kerry, Ayima's head of search, beats me though, as he can see the Ayima building from his flat. Some may call that too close; we call that a good reason to investigate zip wires. May 10, 2010

This may sound elementary, but for Mac users, I highly recommend Quicksilver. If I want to open a folder or application that lives deep within the machine, hitting Cmd + Space and typing the first few letters of the folder / app's name and hitting enter opens it. No searching required. Over time, this saves lots of hassle opening windows and searching through lists of folders and apps, especially if you're not entirely sure where something is. I believe there are alternatives for Linux and Windows as well.

However, there was one specific thing I found online that made me more efficient and productive. I can't recommend it enough. It frees up lots of time instantly. It's simple to use and only takes one click. Try it today for free.

If you have low PR, then it means you have low global link popularity i.e. not many people find your site worth linking or it hasn't got juicy back links.

If you have low true, under-the-hood PageRank, this is probably true. However, perform a highly competitive search like http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=bingo and note how the toolbar PageRank doesn't correlate to the ranking sites. WinkBingo's home page has a toolbar PR of 6 - higher than all the other ranking sites, but it ranks sixth.

There is going to be a good reason why Google ranks these pages, or any others, where it does; however, the the green bar at the top of the ranking pages isn't much of a factor.

Secondly, paying close attention to any one page's toolbar PageRank (which is updated infrequently, often cosmetic and inaccurate due to PageRank's logarithmic nature, e.g. "One PR4 page might have 5 times more PageRank than another PR4 page") and building a site that can have authority easily passed around it, are two entirely different things.

I have also worked on a site that had a PR7 and ranked for nothing. Its PR7 had been obtained by a legitimate content sharing scheme that looked like spam due to content containing links, even though it wasn't spam and wasn't done by SEOs or with SEO in mind. Google gave it its toolbar PageRank, but the site was penalised. We explained the issue and the penalty was lifted. The site's PageRank went down, but it began ranking top-10 for its primary, competitive phrases. In other words, after our reconsideration request Google discounted all of the PageRank passing through those links and the toolbar PageRank went down. However, those links weren't helping to begin with (i.e. the toolbar PageRank score wasn't helping). No one wants a tbPR 7 page that doesn't rank. I'll take a tbPR4 page that ranks over that any day.

From the above example, it's worth noting that a penalised site won't always lose its toolbar PageRank, making toolbar PageRank even less trustworthy a metric.

I completely agree that getting hands dirty with code or tools or any range of technical tasks makes you better at your job.

It reminds me a lot of studying English whilst simultaneously learning Latin and studying linguistics. 60% of English (or thereabouts) is derived from Latin; linguistics investigates why our words work the way they do. I found that both made me a better writer.

Not everyone will enjoy or learn from building a tool to automate or help with link building. However, if building something like this isn't up your street, there are likely technical tasks that you'll enjoy and which will help you learn and understand. Everything remotely technical that I've embarked on in the past few years has made me better at understanding SEO, and I don't do as much of it as I should.

Have a few sites, a few tools or a few old PCs to play with. Break them. Set limits on tasks, like Will's two hour time frame. Learn stuff, even if it's via online tutorials. You'll teach yourself as much as you learn from reading. Wreck an entire website by driving its .htaccess file into a brick wall. You'll be better at .htaccess from that moment on :)

Yet one more thing I don't miss about Twitter (sober since January 25, 2010 ;) ).

Can't say I ever fell victim to spambots following in their hundreds, but I'd still resent the time taken to delete 20 or 30 spam follower emails. Like k0k1man, mine were usually due to saying something really stupid, like "social media".

Some of the really useful stuff I've enjoyed on the blog are those posts that address recurring themes from Q&A. You'll notice that people ask about a certain topic over and over again, so it's obviously something that's on a variety of webmasters' minds. Along with asking outright "what do you want to see", keeping an eye on Q&A queries appears to be really useful for determining current problems or issues.

It's a great ear-to-the-ground and is a great source of blog post ideas. Rand has taken up topics from there a few times. It would be neat to do a weekly or monthly post about a topic picked up form Q&A chatter, however.

Yes, this is something *I* could do. Yes, I'm still 90% allergic to blogging :)

Forget personalisation or complementing factors: apparently clicking on things makes them rank better, according to the Beeb :) How did it happen? They appeared to ask an SEO how Google ranked sites, he told them it was down to popularity, and they misunderstood / didn't clarify what "popularity" meant.

On a related note, parameters can cause search reputation management issues due to malicious modification and linking / indexing :D. Does anyone remember in 2008 when we realised that we could change some big ecommerce site's image parameters to show very different images with product descriptions? I don't think it was Wal-Mart (perhaps K-Mart).

I love the Twitter / Facebook question. From a technical standpoint, I would think that Google would be able to isolate those networks and apply similar authority / spam metrics to their pages as they do to the "traditional" web (whatever that is ;) ).

If they can determine the worth of pages across the Internet, developing trust metrics within Twitter would seem to me quite elementary, and Facebook only slightly more complicated. People share so much in these two places especially: even in the short term, they could be useful for discovery.

One other question I'd like asked regards dynamic parameters. We all still tell people to use static URLs and avoid multiple parameters, but is this still necessary? I'm well aware that AMP.com.au's URL for home loans is horrifying (https://www.amp.com.au/wps/portal/au/AMPAUCategory3C?vigurl=%2Fvgn-ext-templating%2Fv%2Findex.jsp%3Fvgnextoid%3Deb00ae205f711210VgnVCM10000081c0a8c0RCRD)

... and the site resolves with https. And embraces unnecessary virtual subfolders. But how much junk in a URL is too much in 2010?

I'd love to see this too. We have a rough estimate chart on a whiteboard in the office and make use of it for some reporting, but we're constantly telling clients that the breakdown has likely changed, and of course we can't make up for universal search.

This said, some things usually attract news results, images, videos, etc. Click-through stats would now have to come in a group of multiple lists. One for "news appears in the top three", one for "images appear in the top three", etc. If you want to rank for "crossfit training", you're always likely to see video results*. Thus, that list would apply to your work.

It would turn into a far larger piece of work than a numbered list of percentages, but it would give us more to write on the whiteboard.

*in this one example, video results won't load. That's the nature of trying to provide live examples with computers :)

Also proud of being one of the Q&A contributors who says rubbish like "whilst" (and "rubbish"), looks at the web on a "mobile" (not cell) phone, remembers when everyone used Bebo, and spells it "optimisation" ;)

Nice post, Jen! A great post to have around, as I often am asked whilst answering Q&A, "Do you still work here? I thought you left; I went to your profile and read your leaving post!" Not sure how many times I've explained that I work for Ayima Search Marketing in England now :)

And congratulations on hiring Joanna: what a fantastic addition.

I do love it that you used my explanations of what my posts were about as anchor text to link to them!

Sadly, you did leave off my answer to "I'm proud to be a..." though :p

This is a really interesting read, not only because I had that contact with you through Q&A when the process of repair and reinclusion began, but because it's typical of what many organisations have to go through when getting a domain out of jail. However, as goodnewscowboy said above, few people talk about it, probably either out of embarrassment (there's no need to be; these things happen and it often isn't 100% the site's fault), or because they're done with the problem and happily move on. Short version: you don't hear about these stories often, even though they're common.

Reviewing / removing links: been there. Submitting reconsideration requests and knowing full well Google didn't review all of the information: been there. Seen odd behaviour following a request: been there (although you were probably seeing the changes roll out over different data centers).

Delighted you're back ranking again, and I doubt it'll be long until you gain all of your lost ground back, given the good SEO work you're doing now. Very pleased to have helped, and thank you so much again for the gift you sent :D

Some potential downsides I see here are that one, marketing departments are going to have squabbles over whether this is best for getting people to a site as quickly as possible, and two, this could cause more structured negative reputation management attempts as people compete for each other's brand names.

So long as both the URL of the site and a Google suggestion appear somewhere in the ad, of course, it's feasible that SEO teams will try this.

It's escaping me which company was responsible now, but there was quite an amusing "Google [xyz]" misadventure in the UK a few years ago when a company (it may have been Orange?) encouraged people to "search for [um I can't remember] in Google"... when they didn't rank for [yeah] at all. Oops. I guess the first rule of offline-meets-online is that offline has to have at least a basic understanding of online.

Any other UK SEOs, with better memories, remember who was responsible for that blunder?

The underlying message the survey data gives to our kind of marketing people is that these senior marketers would rather I spend lots of time on their site and navigate through loads of pages where I'm served ads I don't see (but yes, which make them money), rather than buy anything, leave my contact details or do anything that qualifies as a conversion.

However, Bludge's comment is great for another perspective. There's a reason for this mindset, even though it's a mindset we don't understand or agree with.

I guess we--the typical crowd you get reading SEO blogs like SEOmoz--are more focused on a) attracting targeted traffic to a website, and b) having those people convert. Thus, we find the idea that marketing should primarily be about generating page views pretty horrifying.

Congratulations guys! Days like today remind me of those first few phone calls about working together... during which Tom frantically IMed me with messages like "WTF is going on?! What is Rand saying?!"

Looking forward to more Moz - Distilled events over this side of the pond in the near future too :) February 01, 2010

The original test, including its flawed analysis, has redeemed its value in that it's prompted another round of testing which is highly unlikely to be the final round, at that. I feel that the intense negative and sometimes unprofessional reaction to the results of the first test are just indicative of a young industry who has yet to learn that science has made wildly inaccurate statements (most of which are far more inaccurate and damaging than anything you said last week) for a long time, but that tempered debate and re-testing only advances the discipline as a whole.

Again, the results probably aren't going to provide a conclusive answer to the question "does PageRank sculpting with nofollow work?", but it'll help the next test be more accurate and mean more. Science can also attest to this: you can't devise the perfect test without doing a whole lot of preliminary tests first, which all reveal their flaws to the benefit of future experiments. You demonstrated this very well last week, and now appear to be demonstrating an understanding of the idea that you can't call "proof" quite so easily.

Classy stuff, Danny. Echoing what others have said above, but it's so refreshing to see you work with the feedback you received from the original post in a highly positive manner, even though some of that feedback descended into negativity. I really hope that any further ideas people have about this sort of test can mirror the positive attitude you've taken here: you've shown that you're genuinely interested in the test's outcomes.

I'm fairly sure I saw someone post the Cuil thing seriously the other day. Either that or their level of tongue-in-cheek is entering Cuil Level 5, possibly resulting in a satirical black hole. November 27, 2009

Excuse initial flippance: Whilst all this is true and interesting, I can't help but think of how amazingly boring it would be to scrutinise my life.

"Oh look, she's read textsfromlastnight.com again. And her complaining about how cold the office is in the morning on Twitter resulted in her buying new fingerless gloves, after telling her friend on IM that she lost hers last winter, in the pub."

This of course leaves out financial, medical and other sensitive information. It also assumes that humans actually look at this data, as opposed to that data being used by computers and computers alone. Which raises the question, does it matter whether it's a human or a machine? Is it intrusive no matter what?

Should someone or something else know all this? Probably not. But it also ain't exactly gripping reading, and some of this data logging is, as you say, probably unavoidable if we want to live the way most of us do.

I'm sort of on the fence as to whether or not I care as much as I feel I should.

In a way, the argument breaks into two halves: one, should this information exist to strangers in any way; and two, could it ever be used for nefarious purposes? And what are nefarious purposes? If you can prove via the activity on a Londoner's Oyster card (bus and train pass) that she was in a specific location when a certain event happened, for example, is that ovely intrusive? Is the answer to that always circumstantial?